Transcendental finitude

Have you ever wondered whether you are but one being? Though you may have affirmed your existence by gazing into the mirror, by being seen and affirmed by others, or through thinking, have you ever found yourself so fully absorbed in your actions that they no longer demanded conscious input? And have you ever experienced a thoughtless existence, however fleeting, seemingly detached from your physical being?

Though humankind might have lamented distance for its accessibility challenges, it is not always distance that bars one from accessing what lies nearest. Had it been otherwise, humankind would not only have mapped the farthest galaxies but would also have long decoded the most intimate being one carries within. If the distance has barred anything, it is just the self. This paradox of distance suggests three key limitations: 1) The pursuit of the self is a relatively recent one. 2) Linguistic limitations have kept the pursuit of the self confined within narrow conceptual bounds. 3) The primary instinct for survival has kept humans preoccupied with the external world rather than with their inner being.

The shift of philosophy from the physical cosmos to the human self has manifested itself in enquiries suggesting that, contrary to prior assumption, it is the knowledge of self that could lead to understanding the reality of the world. Descartes equates the self to pure thinking substance - res cogitans. Merleau-Ponty grounded the self in the body, arguing consciousness is not an interior mind but something woven through the lived body and its engagement with the world. Ibn Arabi maps the self across seven stages - from the commanding nafs al-ammara to al-Insan al-Kamil - realising, through fana and baqa within Wahdat al-Wujud, that self-knowledge is divine knowledge. Others across traditions - Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Ricoeur, Nietzsche, Rumi and Iqbal - have mapped the self variously as soul, body, narrative or divine union.

The diverse connotations of 'self' suggest that it is not as a single being but as a stratum of beings, each waiting to be discovered. So far, three beings, or strata of being, have been discovered. The first is a physical or perceptible being - the body, as attested by sensory experience and perceived by others. The second is the conscious being, Cartesian in spirit, where thought confirms existence. The third, absorbed coping - a state in which consciousness recedes and one engages in pure, unreflective action - reflects Heidegger's notion of ready-to-hand existence and what Csikszentmihalyi later called 'flow'. Here, self-monitoring breaks down and the self dissolves into the activity itself. Though rooted in our perceptual and conscious capacities, this stratum transcends them, shedding all reflective distance. Ultimately, the self becomes absorbed to overcome the constraints of the two preceding selves.

The discovery of each stratum of being has helped us understand the world around. For instance, the senses register the physical world; consciousness helps construct, however subjectively, the reality of oneself and surroundings; and the absorbed coping state transcends the perceptible and conscious reality.

Yet reality remains undeciphered, which points to a deeper truth buried in the unexplored sediments of self or being. For this writer, a fourth, and perhaps a fifth, stratum of being would help resolve the maze surrounding the ontological debates. The fourth, the selfless self, would turn inward anew. Such a pursuit could lead to either the discovery of truth or an acknowledgement of our misleading pursuits. The latter case could lead to a fifth stratum: the super-self, a self that apprehends both self and reality and would guide humankind from their unrealised state towards the path to truth, with objective reality as the sole reality. This could resolve ontological debates, either answering or rendering irrelevant all the questions the reflecting human has held about their being and the world around us.

The self, in its many strata, remains humankind's most profound and unfinished enquiry. To know oneself fully may be to know reality itself. And that pursuit, however elusive, is perhaps the most essentially human endeavour one can undertake.